Sub-GeV dark matter: old anomalies and new detection strategies

by Filippo Sala (Università di Bologna and INFN)

Monday 8 Apr 2024, 14:30 → 16:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G.Marconi)

Dark matter (DM) below a GeV is motivated by some cosmological histories and possibly by anomalies in data. Leading detectors cannot easily test it, due to its small kinetic energy. In this talk I will first revive the light-DM explanation for the 511 keV photon line seen from the galactic centre. I will then discuss the high-energy DM fluxes that necessarily reach us on Earth, and the novel DM detection techniques that they open, with existing experiments. In particular I will present searches, at large neutrino detectors (like Super- and Hyper-Kamiokande, JUNO and DUNE), for DM i) upscattered by cosmic rays and ii) produced in atmospheric showers. These will result in the strongest existing limits on a wide class of sub-GeV DM models. I will finally discuss how analogous ideas allow to obtain novel knowledge about the relic neutrino background, using data from ultra-high-energy CR telescopes (like Icecube, Auger, GRAND and IceCube-Gen2)